Honda’s made a brilliantly retro electric car

Isn’t it the cutest? It’s Honda’s electric car concept, and a production version will be with us in 2019. While other carmakers go for a cloyingly futuristic look for their EVs, Honda has gone unexpectedly retro. With great effect, to our eyes.

Called the Urban EV Concept, it’s shorter than a Honda Jazz and has an infinitely better stance. It’s a refreshingly simple design, with tiny overhangs and lots of glass, harking back to the good old days when cars had actual visibility, and no need for a thousand parking cameras. Though this will probably have those, too.

The doors are rear-hinged, like a Rolls-Royce, though we’d chalk that up on the (hopefully short) list of things the production car won’t have. What it will have is the Honda badge backlit in blue – the spotter’s first sign of a Honda EV from now on – and perhaps some of the status updates you can post in the area that would normally be a grille.

Details of the electric powertrain beneath are conspicuous by their absence. Our hunch is that it’ll be a fairly simple front-wheel drive setup with around 100bhp. You wouldn’t need much more in a car this size, and you’d imagine Honda wants to eke out as much range as possible now that the Nissan Leaf claims over 320 kilometres.